December 14, 2009

Deal struck to restore millions of Bush WH emails

An investigation into e-mails that seemed to have disappeared from the Bush White House has resulted in restoration of 22 million of the missing messages and a deal to uncover what could be millions of other e-mails that allegedly fell through cracks in the archiving system, two nonprofit groups said Monday.

However, an untold number of official e-mails from President George W. Bush's era will probably never be recovered because it would be extremely costly to do so, lawyers involved in lawsuits brought by the National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said.

"While we have not gotten every e-mail, some major gaps have been filled," said Meredith Fuchs, an attorney for the National Security Archive.

A settlement the groups reached with President Barack Obama's White House and signed on Monday does not call for the e-mails to be made public immediately. The records from many key White House offices will remain under wraps for at least four more years, while those from some agencies housed within the White House complex can be requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

Asked if the losses of the e-mails were deliberate, neglectful or accidental, Fuchs said, "The Bush Administration had sloppy practices and they had no sense that it mattered….The way they handled it to me suggested they didn't take their record preservation obligations seriously. To me, the way they dealt with us during the litigation signaled that."

After the groups filed lawsuits over the alleged failures, the Bush Administration used backup tapes to restore emails from 21 days where the number of messages archived through the official mechanism was unusually low. Bush officials also restored 40 other days selected at random. That process resulted, during the Bush era, in the recovery of the 22 million e-mails.

"Documents produced so far show the Bush White House was lying when officials claimed no emails were ever missing. The record now proves incontrovertibly that Bush administration officials deliberately ignored the problem and, in fact, knowingly allowed it to worsen," CREW said in a press release.

Melanie Sloan, CREW's Executive Director, added: "We may never know exactly what happened to all the missing emails, and which Bush administration officials were involved in the coverup, but we do know the American public never got the full story."

A White House spokesman under Bush, Scott Stanzel, accused CREW of being on an ideological vendetta against the Bush Administration.

"The liberal group CREW litigates for sport, distorts the facts and has consistently tried to create a spooky conspiracy out of standard information technology issues. Their misleading statements about our work demonstrates their continued anti-Bush agenda, nearly a year after a new President was sworn in," Stanzel said in an e-mail. He did not comment on the Archive, a research organization which specializes in gathering declassified documents.

Under the settlement, the Obama White House has agreed to restore 33 more days from the Bush presidency and to put in place what Obama aides say is a more reliable system for archiving than the "journaling" and "personal storage files" the Bush administration used after a conversion from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook. Fuchs said the total of 94 days of restoration would exhaust about $11 million in federal funds set aside for the recovery project.

"The President is firmly committed to ensuring that the records of this Administration-as well as those of all previous administrations-are properly retained and preserved," Obama White House ethics counsel Norm Eisen said in a blog post Monday. Eisen, who happens to be a co-founder of CREW, also offered praise for the groups who pursued and settled the case. "We especially want to thank CREW and NSA for their hard work with us in bringing the case to a successful conclusion and in promoting openness in government," he said.

UPDATE: This post was updated to add comment from Stanzel.